The Tarbabys Blog

The Kansas City Star

Hawley proved he’s not just antidemocratic in coup attempt. He’s also a sloppy lawyer

Alan Howard – February 10, 2022

A prime example of bad lawyering is when a lawyer loses a possibly winnable case because he misses an important legal deadline. A recent decision by a Pennsylvania court suggests that is essentially what Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri did when he waited until Jan. 6, 2021, to oppose Pennsylvania’s “no excuse” mail in voting law on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Late last month, by a 3-2 margin, a lower court in Pennsylvania decided in the McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania case that the state’s no-excuse mail-in voting law conflicted with a provision of the state constitution. But all of the five lower court judges, Republicans and Democrats, unanimously reaffirmed what the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously ruled in the December 2020 case of Kelly v. Pennsylvania: that after an election is held, the no-excuse mail-in votes must be deemed legally valid because it is legally too late to disqualify those votes. But that is exactly what Hawley tried and failed to do on Jan. 6.

In addition to being legally invalid, Hawley’s objection to the Senate certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden was inequitable and antidemocratic. Hawley challenged the legitimacy of America’s 2020 presidential election, and sought to cancel millions of votes legally cast by the people of Pennsylvania, on the basis of a legal argument that had already been rejected by the highest state and federal courts. Hawley falsely suggested that the United States, the longest continuous democracy on the planet, allowed its citizens to cast and count millions of illegal votes for the most powerful political office in the world. By improperly seeking to discredit and disallow Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for Biden, Hawley collaborated with Donald Trump’s corrosive effort to convince the American people — and the world — that America’s presidential election was improper and illegal.

As a matter of law, Hawley was wrong to base his attack on Pennsylvania’s votes on a legal premise that had already been rejected by the state’s Supreme Court in the Kelly case. As a trained lawyer, Hawley must have understood that the argument he made on the floor of the Senate had already been rejected by the judiciary on the basis of an overriding procedural doctrine, the doctrine of laches, which applied equally to Hawley’s untimely objection.

In applying the doctrine of laches to uphold the legitimacy of the mail-in votes cast in Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court correctly held that there was an overwhelming need to protect the legitimate reliance of the Pennsylvania voters on a then-unchallenged state law that clearly authorized their no-excuse mail-in votes at the time the votes were cast. It is a shame that Hawley did not apply such an enlightened and legally grounded approach to respect and protect millions of legally cast votes by American citizens when he made his theatrical stand in the Senate.

The laches law applies equally Hawley’s Electoral College challenge. Like the tardy and defeated plaintiffs in Kelly, Hawley was seeking no less than the “disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voters,” as the Pennsylvania high court phrased the issue, contrary to applicable law as already determined by the applicable and final judicial rulings.

All of the judges in the recent McLinko case, Republicans and Democrats, sent a powerful message to anyone — Hawley, Trump, or anyone else — who thinks, however without basis, that mail-in votes are inherently a threat to electoral integrity that they must bring their legal challenges before voters reasonably rely on the laws to cast their ballots. Nothing stopped anyone with standing from challenging the Pennsylvania no-excuse mail-in voting law before the 2020 presidential election. (Indeed, that is what the plaintiffs have so far successfully done in the McLinko litigation for the next Pennsylvania election.)

Hawley’s failure to enlist a plaintiff in Pennsylvania to do so before the 2020 election, but instead asking the U.S. Senate to unfairly disenfranchise millions of Pennsylvania voters after the election in violation of the controlling equitable doctrine of laches, was a colossal example of bad lawyering — but far more important, it was shamefully inequitable, anti-democratic and anti-American voter.

Alan Howard is a professor of law emeritus at the St. Louis University Law School, where he taught constitutional law. He co-authored this with his brother Bruce Howard, an attorney in Los Angeles and a former professor of law at the University of Southern California Law School.

HuffPost

Damning Fox News Supercut From ‘Daily Show’ Exposes Network’s Newest Hypocrisy

Ed Mazza – February 11, 2022

Fox News has turned the Canadian trucker protests into its latest obsession, with many of its hosts practically cheering drivers opposed to vaccine mandates as they shut down key border crossings.

The right-wing network’s coverage of rising tension at the northern border has been very different from how its personalities have handled southern border dramas.

A new “Daily Show” supercut shows the hypocrisy by mashing up footage of the trucker protests with comments Fox News figures have made about migrants approaching from the south:https://www.youtube.com/embed/qSSg1J7EYSo?rel=0

The trucker blockade began with a protest over coronavirus vaccine mandates.

However, the Canadian Trucking Alliance, which represents truckers, said last month that “a great number of these protestors have no connection to the trucking industry and have a separate agenda.”

That agenda seems increasingly linked to the far right, with some protesters waving Confederate flags and Nazi swastikas.

Yahoo! – Finance

COVID-19: We need to vaccinate more young people and kids, doctor urges

Adriana Belmonte, Senior Editor – February 10, 2022

Only about 20% of children between the ages of 5-11 in the U.S. are fully vaccinated despite COVID-19 vaccines being approved for this age group three months ago.

For kids between the ages of 12-17, roughly half are vaccinated while just 20% are boosted. In other words, there are still millions of children vulnerable to COVID-19.

“I think more of us need to be really frank with the American people … that [vaccines] are safe, they are effective, that COVID is massively affecting kids, especially during this Omicron surge,” Dr. Anand Swaminathan, a New Jersey-based emergency medicine physician, said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “And these [cases] are preventable. These are preventable hospitalizations. They are preventable deaths in kids.”

‘Their lives are being affected by their long-term symptoms’

COVID cases among children have risen steadily over the last several months, largely due to the virulence of the Omicron variant.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), there have been nearly 4.2 million cases reported since the beginning of January and nearly 632,000 cases for the week ending Feb. 3. That more than doubles the Delta variant peak in 2021.

“The American Academy of Pediatrics and really every pediatrician that I’ve had the good fortune to meet has been very strong on the side of vaccinating children,” Fairbrother said. “It is true that COVID is not a huge risk to children. There are very few children who got super sick with COVID, and an even smaller percentage of them who died of COVID.”

Since COVID first hit the U.S., over 12 million children have tested positive for the virus, according to AAP. Less than 1% of the COVID cases among children have resulted in death.

“It’s not a huge number but still, seven died in January from COVID,” Swaminathan said. “Those are preventable deaths. We don’t need to have any kids dying of this. Vaccines can help to protect the group where they’re approved.”

At the same time, children infected with the coronavirus are at risk for developing multi-system inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), which the CDC defines as “a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs.” There have been more than 6,800 cases of MIS-C in the U.S. and 59 deaths tied to the issue.

“Their lives are being affected by their long-term symptoms,” Dr. Hilary Fairbrother, a Houston-based emergency medicine physician, said recently on Yahoo Finance Live. “And that’s 10-15% of children who get COVID. All of these things are mitigated by the vaccine. MIS-C is essentially gone. 95% reduction of MIS-C. The long-term COVID symptoms, essentially gone, and essentially zero ability to have COVID kill a child who is vaccinated.”

‘These are the safest vaccines we have ever seen’

Pfizer (PFE) recently announced that it would be seeking FDA approval and emergency use authorization for its COVID vaccine for children six months and older, which Fairbrother described as “very exciting.”

Fairbrother emphasized the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and encouraged parents who may be unsure about vaccinating their children to speak with their pediatrician.

“I know that parents are very caring and very loving about their children,” Fairbrother said. “And they want to make sure something is safe before they give their children a new product. I want to come out and be very clear that in our modern medical history, these are the safest vaccines we have ever seen or really, frankly, even imagined.”

Though Pfizer’s recent news is a promising development in the fight against COVID, Swaminathan cautioned against only focusing on “the new shiny toy” when there are already things in place that have proven to be effective, like vaccinations for the population at large.

Currently, 64.1% of the overall U.S. population is fully vaccinated while 75.7% have received at least one dose and 42.3% have been boosted, according to the latest CDC data.

Vaccinating more young people and the spread of different COVID strains may be key to developing immunity in the overall population, according to Dr. Asha Shah, director of infectious disease at Stamford Health.

“That will help contribute to the shift from pandemic to endemic and not thinking about COVID first thing when you’re making social plans or making travel plans, that this becomes like many of the other coronaviruses that circulate in the community,” Shah recently said on Yahoo Finance Live. “That will likely take some time, but this may be a shift in that direction.”

Shah described vaccines as “our most important tool” that can help the population adjust to new variants that could potentially emerge.

“I think the fact that technology exists and that these companies are working on new formulations is a smart way to move forward,” she said. “And I do think we’re going to get to a point where perhaps we get a COVID booster at a regular interval that perhaps contains the most predominant variants from the last COVID season, similar to what we do for influenza.”

Shaw stressed that a larger part of the population needs to be up-to-date on their COVID vaccines, whether they need first or second doses or are in need of a booster.

“There’s still a lot of people that have not received a single dose of a COVID vaccine, and that’s a problem,” she said. “And that’s what we saw was overwhelming the hospitals through this last surge. We have to get everyone vaccinated with this very effective tool. That’s the way we move forward.”

Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance. 

McConnell shudders after trump unmasks the GOP as the party of pro-January 6 lawlessness

Kerry Eleveld, Daily Kos Staff – February 10, 2022 

If the Republican Party is going to attack the Biden administration on the national uptick in crime—including a record-spike in homicides during Donald Trump’s tenure—it must be viewed as the party of law and order.

The fact that Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are now endorsing the Jan. 6 attack and bear-hugging its perpetrators has McConnell running scared.

“This is pretty simple,” McConnell told CNN on Wednesday. “We are in the middle of a national crime wave. The Republican Party is a pro-police, tough-on-crime party. And I am a pro-police, tough-on-crime Republican across the board.”

Is it really, Senator?

McConnell made the assertion just weeks after Trump dangled the idea of pardoning every Jan. 6 convict if he wins reelection in 2024. McConnell’s claim also stood in stark contrast to the Republican National Committee’s endorsement last week of the deadly violence unleashed by Jan. 6 attackers as “legitimate political discourse.” In fact, the violent insurrection injured more than a hundred police officers protecting the Capitol that day, several of whom died, and to this day, many officers continue to suffer from ongoing mental anguish due to the trauma of the attack.

Yet, given the choice between the police who defended U.S. lawmakers and the insurrectionists who beat them and defiled the Capitol, both Trump and the national Republican Party sided with the insurrectionists.

Two separate polls this week have shown that roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose pardoning people who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol—one from Politico/Morning Consult and one from Navigator Research.

On Tuesday, McConnell pushed back against the RNC censure resolution declaring the Jan. 6 attack “legitimate political discourse.” Rejecting that characterization outright, McConnell called the pro-Trump assault on the Capitol a “violent insurrection.”

Most congressional Republicans, not wanting to anger McConnell, have conceded that the attack was violent, but almost all of them have taken issue with the word “insurrection.”

“I don’t know that I would go that far. But it was something that we’re not proud of,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama told CNN. “It was violent. I just wouldn’t call it an insurrection.”

Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, a Freedom Caucus member, said only a “small portion” of Jan. 6 rioters broke the law and should be prosecuted. But, he added, “It was not an attempt to overthrow the government. It was not.”

This point of distinction between criminal violence and a full-blown insurrection is surely one of the reasons Republicans had originally insisted on a very narrow investigation of Jan. 6 itself, excluding an exploration of the broader context of what led to the attack. Widening the lens to the events leading up to Jan. 6 makes it glaringly apparent that the Capitol assault was just one small part of a Trump-led conspiracy to overturn a free and fair election.

Regardless, endorsing the Capitol attack, at its core, is an endorsement of lawlessness and chaos, and McConnell desperately wants the Republican Party to be able to claim the mantle of law and order heading into the midterms.

Too bad Donald Trump and the RNC have completely blown up that notion.

The Week

Why the Trump toilet story (unfortunately) still matters

Joel Mathis, Contributing Writer – February 10, 2022

Did former President Donald Trump really clog White House toilets by flushing official documents? His aides certainly thought so, journalist Maggie Haberman reports in her forthcoming book. Trump denies the story. But the anecdote rings true — if only as a metaphor for his misbegotten presidency.

The toilet story is the cherry on top of a week’s worth of revelations about how Trump routinely mishandled his administration’s records. He would tear up documents, forcing federal archivists to literally tape them back together. He took 15 boxes of stuff — letters from Kim Jong Un, that infamous Sharpie map — home to Mar-a-Lago instead of turning it over to the National Archives, as required by law. Some of the material was apparently classified. Investigations are now underway.

The “but her emails” crowd is howling, as you might imagine.

And that’s fair. Trump really did ride to the presidency in 2016 on the back of revelations that Hillary Clinton used a private email server to conduct official business while she was secretary of state. Democrats have spent the last half-dozen years grumbling that the investigation and media coverage of a relatively minor misstep prevented the election of America’s first woman president and instead put a dishonest grifter in office. But Trump’s hypocrisy on that front has been known for awhile now. For the former president, standards are for other people.

What’s really interesting about the recent stories is not the rule-breaking, then, but what they reveal about Trump’s overall mindset in the presidency. A born narcissist, he never did distinguish between his personal business and the country’s interests, between public service and his private desires. It all got mushed up together, usually to Trump’s benefit and America’s disadvantage.

It’s why he refused to divest his assets when he became president. It’s why the Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. became for a few years the hottest spot in town for foreign diplomats and assorted influence peddlers. It’s why he mostly treated the pandemic as an election obstacle and not as the public health crisis it actually was. And it’s why he tried to upend the 2020 presidential election — he sincerely believed the White House was his to keep.

So it’s no wonder Trump took all those boxes home to Florida, or that he treated official documents so casually. It was all his stuff, right? Except it wasn’t. It belonged to the American public.

This might not be worth getting terribly worked up over. There are a lot of Trump scandals, after all, and one must prioritize. But Trump remains the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. What’s past is prologue. The former president is not trying to return to public service — it’s not clear he even understands the concept. He’s simply trying to reclaim what’s his.

Insider

Trump denies flushing records down the toilet, says he was told he was under ‘no obligation’ to turn over documents, despite the law requiring it

Brent D. Griffiths – February 10, 2022

• Trump denies Maggie Haberman’s report that he would clog toilets by trying to flush documents down them.
• Trump also says he was “told I was under no obligation” to promptly turn over his records, which isn’t how the law works.
• There are now at least four reported ways Trump tried to destroy documents in the White House.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday denied reports that he flushed documents down a White House toilet and said he was told he was under “no obligation” to turn over his administration’s records, a claim that flies in the face of presidential records law.

“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in a statement released by his Save America PAC after Axios reported on excerpts of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s upcoming book, “Confidence Man.”

Bloomberg White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs said Haberman’s reporting about the documents in toilets is “100% accurate” and that sources at the time confirm that staff found torn up pieces of papers in toilets and thought that Trump was behind it.

Trump has now faced days of questions and reports over his apparent flouting of the Presidential Records Act, which requires every White House to preserve memos, documents, and other memorabilia that is considered the property of the American people.

“In actuality, I have been told I was under no obligation to give this material based on various legal rulings that have been made over the years,” Trump claimed in his statement.

The National Archives, which collects, sorts through, and later releases presidential records, has asked the Justice Department to investigate if Trump broke the law when he took documents to Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported. In another sign of the seriousness of the situation, The Times reports that officials found possible classified information in the documents Trump belatedly handed over.

There are now at least four reported ways Trump sought to destroy documents while in the White House:

• He ripped them up (as Politico first reported in 2018).
• He ate them.
• He dropped them on the floor.
• And he flushed them down the toilet.

Axios, citing Haberman’s book, reports that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.”

Historians and experts have pointed out that the Presidential Records Act is relatively toothless in punishing those who fail to comply with it. But, as The Daily Beast reported, one federal law dealing with the mutilation or destruction of documents carries the possibility that Trump could be barred from ever holding office again.

The New York Times

One Menacing Call After Another: Threats Against Lawmakers Surge

Catie Edmondson and Mark Walker – February 10, 2022

WASHINGTON — Early one morning in November 2019, Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., received a profanity-laden voicemail message at his office in which the caller identified himself as a trained sharpshooter and said he wanted to blow the congressman’s head off.

Two years earlier, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., received a similar voicemail message from an irate man who falsely accused her of threatening President Donald Trump’s life. “If you do it again, you’re dead,” he said, punctuating the statement with expletives and a racial epithet against Waters, who is Black.

Across the country, the office of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., received a profane call from a man who said that someone should “put a bullet in her” skull, before leaving his name and phone number.

The cases were part of a New York Times review of more than 75 indictments of people charged with threatening lawmakers since 2016. The flurry of cases shed light on a chilling trend: In recent years, and particularly since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, a growing number of Americans have taken ideological grievance and political outrage to a new level, lodging concrete threats of violence against members of Congress.

The threats have come in almost every conceivable combination: Republicans threatening Democrats, Democrats threatening Republicans, Republicans threatening Republicans. Many of them, the review showed, were fueled by forces that have long dominated politics, including deep partisan divisions and a media landscape that stokes resentment.

But they surged during Trump’s time in office and in its aftermath, as the former president’s own violent language fueled a mainstreaming of menacing political speech and lawmakers used charged words and imagery to describe the stakes of the political moment. Far-right members of Congress have hinted that their followers should be prepared to take up arms and fight to save the country, and in one case even posted a video depicting explicitly violent acts against Democrats.

A plurality of the cases reviewed by The Times, more than a third, involved Republican or pro-Trump individuals threatening Democrats or Republicans they found insufficiently loyal to the former president, with upticks around Trump’s first impeachment and, later, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol last year. In some cases leading up to Congress’ official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, callers left messages with lawmakers in both parties warning them to keep Trump in office or face violence.

Nearly a quarter of the cases were Democrats threatening Republicans. Many of those threats were driven by anger over lawmakers’ support for Trump and his policies, including Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as the drive to confirm one of his Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh.

In 2018, for example, a Florida man called the office of Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., nearly 500 times and threatened to kill his children over the congressman’s support for Trump’s family separation policy at the southern border.

Other cases had no discernible partisan leanings or were driven by delusion or wild conspiracy theories, such as the belief embraced by QAnon that Democrats are part of a satanic cult.

Overall, threats against members of Congress reached a record high of 9,600 last year, according to data provided by the Capitol Police, double the previous year’s total. In the first three months of 2021 alone, the Capitol Police fielded more than 4,100 threats against lawmakers in the House and Senate, straining the law enforcement personnel tasked with investigating them.

“We’re barely keeping our head above water for those investigations,” J. Thomas Manger, the Capitol Police chief, testified last month. “We’re going to have to nearly double the number of agents who work those threat cases.”

Threats against members of Congress jumped more than fourfold after Trump took office. In 2016, the Capitol Police investigated 902 threats; the following year, that number reached 3,939.

The threats range from phone calls with gruesome, specific descriptions of violence that have led to jail time for the callers to broad threats posted on social media for which juries have, on occasion, acquitted those charged.

Each threat is reviewed and “thoroughly investigated,” a Capitol Police spokesman said. The reviews include assessments of the potential for targeted violence and the immediate risk to the victim. In some cases, the Capitol Police work in tandem with the FBI to investigate.

Two days after the Electoral College confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, Ryder Winegar, a former Navy cryptologist living in New Hampshire, called six members of Congress — both Democrats and Republicans — while heavily intoxicated and threatened to hang them if they did not support Trump.

In one of the calls, he warned that if a lawmaker did not stand behind Trump, he would hang them, according to court records. He also said that he would refuse to vote for any “RINO candidate like yourself,” using the acronym for Republican in name only.

In another call, Winegar said a member of Congress could worry either about being “outed as a racist” or about people like him “stringing” her up.

In Illinois, Randall Tarr was drinking coffee and watching television early one morning — either the History Channel or National Geographic, he recalled in an interview — when he saw an advertisement accusing Davis of turning a blind eye to Russian interference in the 2016 election and encouraging viewers to call his office. Tarr, an Army veteran who at one time identified as a Republican, was furious.

“I’m like, dude, I got to do this,” Tarr recounted. “It’s already been proven by our intelligence agencies, the CIA and the FBI, and the Russians were guilty of this. I didn’t stop there. I just kept going, which was stupid. Something I shouldn’t have said, I know.”

In the voicemail message, according to court records, Tarr informed Davis of his training — “I’m a sharpshooter,” he said — and threatened to murder the congressman.

“That was a stupid part of my call,” Tarr said in the interview. “I don’t even own a weapon. I just got mad, and I regret it.”

Patrick Carlineo Jr., who had been gorging himself on right-wing talk radio before making the call to threaten Omar, also expressed regret when he appeared before a judge in 2019.

“I was listening to the Glenn Beck show, then I listened to Rush Limbaugh, and they were talking about her on both shows, and I get a little carried away with the coffee in the morning,” Carlineo said. “I just got all fired up.”

Anthony Lloyd, who threatened Waters in 2017, told the FBI agents who were dispatched to investigate his call that he also “religiously” followed the news and had grown upset after hearing on talk radio that the California congresswoman had threatened Trump’s life, a false claim.

“I’m not a planner, I’m not a terrorist guy,” Lloyd told the agents. “I’m very patriotic and I love my country.”

Most calls have not led to actual violence. But they can terrorize offices, sending lawmakers rushing to cancel events and find security, and traumatizing the aides or even interns who have the misfortune to answer them.

In another case, an aide in Waters’ district office testified that she answered the phone one morning and received a broadside from a caller who hurled racial epithets and said he would be attending all of the congresswoman’s events and would kill her and “every last one of you that works for her.” The call was so frightening that the aide physically shook upon hearing it, she testified.

Many of the threats, especially those directed at lawmakers of color, contained racial slurs or threats against certain races. Others used the language of white supremacy, like the caller who threatened Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., both of whom are white, and said he would start shooting Black people.

In several cases, defense lawyers have taken to arguing that their client should not be punished for comments that were consistent with what elected officials and political pundits have said. Several rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 have employed similar “Trump made me do it” defenses.

When the judge in Carlineo’s case expressed concern during a hearing that the defendant had referred to Omar in his phone call as a “radical Muslim” and said that people like her had no place in government, his lawyer cited comments both Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence had made about her.

In a second case involving a threat against Waters, the defendant’s lawyer argued that the judge should allow her to explain to the jury that her client’s call came after Trump had publicly feuded with Waters, and that the threat had even quoted some of Trump’s insults about the congresswoman.

In most cases, judges were clearly unsympathetic.

“Just because the current leader in Washington is permitting the type of discourse,” one judge fumed in 2017, when Trump was president, “that does not mean that it has to be countenanced. Some of this is just vile and threatening.”

The Columbus Dispatch

Opinion: We must give Russia multiple reasons to ‘think twice’ before attacking Ukraine

Glen Duerr – February 8, 2022

At times, mired in corruption and with ongoing challenges in numerous areas of society, Ukraine — a former Soviet republic — is a country many people typically overlook.

Yet, despite these challenges — many of which were inherited under its time in the Soviet Union — Ukraine maintains a broadly democratic structure that tries to uphold the rule of law and provides a level of liberty and freedom for its citizens.

More: Putin ‘won’t stop’ with Ukraine: Why Americans should care about Russia’s aggression against its neighbor

There is no treaty that binds Ukraine’s defense to the United States as the former is not a member of NATO. And while the United States is a signatory on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which effectively handed over nuclear weapons from Kiev to Moscow in exchange for promises to uphold Ukraine’s territorial integrity, it is not a treaty obligation for Washington that promises protection by American troops.

But if Russia invades Ukraine again, as it did in 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the stalemated frozen conflicts in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, or installs a puppet pro-Russian regime in Kiev, it threatens much of the existing world order enjoyed since the end of World War II.

More: OnPolitics: Why should Americans care about the Ukraine conflict?

That order is messy and has sometimes caused economic upheavals, but the world since 1945 has been made much safer for the expansion of the free market, constitutional rights, and liberty, in many parts of the globe.

As such, policymakers in the United States and its allies should do as much as possible to dissuade Vladimir Putin from further territorial breaches of Ukraine.

More: Respect, fear, power: What’s motivating Vladimir Putin to threaten Ukraine?

Failure to at least assist Ukraine emboldens other autocratic regimes around the world like China, Iran, and Turkey to engage in similar behaviors. Suddenly, there may be a lot less liberty and far fewer protections for constitutional rights and the free market.

Vladimir Putin has long claimed that NATO’s expansion in eastern Europe is an inherent threat to Russia’s security. Historically, Russia has been invaded from the west on several occasions: by Poland-Lithuania in 1610, Sweden in 1709, Napoleon’s France in 1812, during the Russian Civil War in 1917, and Hitler’s Germany in 1941. Yet, this argument is a “straw man” in many respects.

First, Russia’s assertion that it needs a buffer is historically misplaced.

Joseph Stalin negotiated such a buffer with Roosevelt and Churchill at the end of World War II, citing the massive death toll on the Soviet Union in fending off the Nazis.

While this is true, Stalin himself allowed his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to sign an agreement with his German counterpart, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, to divide eastern Europe (also known as the Nazi/Soviet non-aggression pact). Stalin himself assumed that Hitler would be of no threat to him.

Second, democracies and democratic aspirants throughout eastern Europe are far more threatened by Russia than the other way around, as evidenced by numerous incursions to the airspaces of Russia’s neighbors as well as ongoing and increasingly sophisticated cyber espionage coming from Moscow. No country in eastern Europe in modern times has considered the prospect of attacking Russia.

More: Russian attack on Ukraine would bring ‘significant’ casualties, Gen. Milley says: What we know

The United States and many NATO allies have done much to arm and train Ukrainians to defend themselves against the threat of Russian militarism. Yet, much more could be done, especially in terms of sanctions and pressuring Putin in the energy sector.

A return to North American energy independence and/or an increase in the global energy supply will help, noting that Putin generally does not act out on the world stage while the supply of oil and natural gas is high around the world, pushing down his profits in the energy sector.

More: US responds to Russia’s demands and doesn’t yield on Ukraine and NATO: What to know

Next, NATO should refuse all concessions to Russia except for trying to assure the Kremlin that the West has no ambitions to ever engage in an unprovoked attack against it.

Finally, further helping Ukrainians is another key deterrent. Although Russia is on paper far more powerful than Ukraine, lessons of the 1939-1940 Winter War are apparent. In that conflict, the small country of Finland fended off an abrasive attack from the Soviet Union and fought the superpower to a draw.

Pressuring Vladimir Putin on several fronts and reminding him of this history is a useful way to have him think twice before attacking Ukraine. Although the current world order certainly has its shortcomings, it is a system where the free market, constitutional rights, and liberty, have generally expanded.

Glen Duerr is associate professor of International Studies at Cedarville University.

The Conversation

The Jan. 6 Capitol attacks offer a reminder – distrust in government has long been part of Republicans’ playbook

Amy Fried, John M. Nickerson Professor of Political Science, University of Maine and Douglas B. Harris, Professor of political science, Loyola University Maryland – February 9, 2022

The Republican National Committee has legitimized the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attacks. The RNC declared on Feb. 4, 2022, that the insurrection and preceding events were “legitimate political discourse” — an assertion that Sen. Mitch McConnell soon after countered, saying that it was a “violent insurrection.”

The Justice Department is investigating former President Donald Trump’s involvement on Jan. 6, when several thousand rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The attacks resulted in the deaths of at least seven people and the injury of 150 police officers.

Meanwhile, Trump says he will consider pardoning Jan. 6 rioters if he is reelected in 2024, while continuing to lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

It’s the latest step in a long-standing, systemic effort of the Republican Party to sow and capitalize on public distrust.

As political scientists who study the politics of public opinion and congressional rhetoric, we have chronicled American conservatives’ decadeslong strategic use of distrustful rhetoric in our book “At War with Government.”

How distrust can help in politics

There are a few clear benefits to leveraging distrust as a political tool.

Over the past several decades, Republicans have used distrust to caution voters against opponents in election campaigns and to argue that Democrats’ policy proposals would hurt Americans. Republicans have also sown political distrust toward institutions they did not control – like the presidency – while seeking to empower the same institutions when they were in power.

Our research shows that distrust has been a particularly powerful resource for Republican politicians as they work to galvanize the conservative base and attract the independent voters they need to win elections.

History of distrust

In the 1950s, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy conducted a series of high-profile probes into U.S. government officials’ potential Communist Party affiliations. McCarthy and others used smear tactics to delegitimize political opponents, painting them as untrustworthy.

Public trust in government dropped precipitously, from 77% in October 1964 to 36% in December 1974.

Democrats began championing civil rights in the early 1960s. Republicans then adopted an electoral plan known as the Southern strategy around 1968, wooing white Southerners who opposed Democrats’ progressive direction on civil rights and social issues and who championed states’ power.

Various presidential administrations’ secrecy about the Vietnam War, as well as former President Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal, furthered political distrust.

Left-wing American politicians have also capitalized on government distrust, especially regarding national security. Historian Paul Sabin attributes distrust in government to such liberal reformers as Ralph Nader, who criticized cozy relationships between government and business.

But it is largely Republicans who have strategically promoted political distrust. Republicans have also used distrust to rally against Democrats’ health policy proposals.

Working for the American Medical Association in 1961, 20 years before his election, for example, former President Ronald Reagan said that the proposal that would become Medicare was “one of the traditional methods of imposing socialism or statism on a people.”

Newt Gingrich’s 1990s fight against former President Bill Clinton and House Democrats marked a turning point, as Gingrich encouraged his fellow Republicans to use hyperbolic and highly personal attacks against Democratic colleagues, casting them as undeserving of citizens’ trust.

An early 1990s campaign memo from Gingrich advised candidates to define “the Democrats as the party of radical left-wing activists, unionized bureaucracies, and corrupt political machines.”

When arguing against Clinton’s proposed health reform, Republicans used phrases like “Gestapo medicine” to elicit fear of a destructive government.

In 2009 and 2010, opponents of the Affordable Care Act raised the prospect of government “death panels” making life-and-death decisions for citizens. A Republican strategist urged Republican leaders to characterize the health care plan as a “government takeover” which “like coups … lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”

‘He had everyone enraged’

The echoes of more than a half-century of anti-government rhetoric spilled over on Jan. 6.

Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric, along with his claim that elections are rigged, fueled people’s long-held suspicions toward government.

In a New York federal district court in January 2021, one of the accused Jan. 6 insurrectionists defended his participation in the attack, saying that he had “tired of the corruption of government.”

Some protesters present on Jan. 6 were involved in far-right anti-government groups, such as the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes wrote on the messaging app Signal two days after the November 2020 election that the group’s members shouldn’t accept the election results, saying, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”

Other insurrectionists rationalized their actions by citing Trump’s false claims in court.

Some rioters, for example, defended themselves against trespassing charges by saying that Trump “invited” them to the Capitol.

One accused insurrectionist, Zachary Wilson, said, “I was caught up in President Trump telling everybody the election was stolen. He had everyone enraged.”

Trump’s promotion of distrust about the election results proved legally dangerous to citizens who were moved by his rhetoric.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta told one Jan. 6 defendant that he was “a pawn” of those who lied about the 2020 election results. The people who believed the lie “are the ones paying the [legal] consequences,” Mehta said

Distrust in the American election system has grown since the Jan. 6 attacks. More than 3 in 10 Americans believe the nation’s system is fundamentally unsound, according to a November 2021 Monmouth University poll, up from 22% in January 2021. That finding fits with the longer-term GOP effort to weaponize political distrust.

Read more:

• Behind the 11 Oath Keepers charged with sedition are many more who have been trained by the US military
• Civil war in the US is unlikely because grievance doesn’t necessarily translate directly into violence

Both authors received support for portions of the research for their book, “At War With Government: How Conservatives weaponized Distrust from Goldwater to Trump” (2021, Columbia University Press). Amy Fried received funding from the University of Maine for several archival visits and to support research assistants at several other archives. Douglas B. Harris received funding from the Everett McKinley Dirksen Congressional Research Center, the Carl Albert Congressional Research & Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma, and the Loyola University Summer Research Grant Program.

Amy Fried does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Daily Beast

Sorry, Mitch McConnell. Frankenstein’s Monster Runs the GOP Now

Wajahat Ali – February 9, 2022

Groupthink, obedience, loyalty, and propaganda are the lifeblood of every successful cult trying to indoctrinate, retain, and strengthen its members. That’s why it was such a rare and strange sight to see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly break with the Republican National Committee and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy over the censure of Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

Don’t be fooled by this public theater. McConnell is desperately trying to put lipstick on a wild, savage pig before a contentious and pivotal 2022 midterm election. He realizes the aforementioned livestock he’s nurtured has transformed into a radicalized and weaponized death herd willing to violently tear down our democratic institutions.

Republican National Committee Chairperson Ronna McDaniel reflected the grievance of a wounded cult member when she said, “Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line” by choosing to join “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in a legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with the violence at the Capitol.” Sen. Mitt Romney—McDaniel’s uncle— apparently “exchanged texts” with his niece over the RNC’s “inappropriate message,” but, alas, he was unpersuasive.

Republicans Actually Love Affirmative Action (for Themselves)

Maybe he should engage in “legitimate political discourse” by arming himself with a variety of weapons like the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent riot that led to the deaths of five people, including a cop. They intended to engage in “discourse” with stun guns, bats, flagpoles, rope, and pepper spray. Many of these “ordinary citizens” were actively hunting for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—who is now seen as a “traitor” for deciding to opt-out of Trump’s coup and instead reflect the will of the American people and their voters.

Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju about the RNC’s controversial statement last week, McConnell replied that January 6 “was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next.”

But it would be a grave mistake to assume that McConnell and other Republicans—such as Sens. Romney and John Thune, who support his sentiment—are “moderate Republicans,” an oxymoron that should have been retired in 2016. They are walking dinosaurs soon to be replaced by the true base of the GOP, which increasingly believes in the Big Lie, entertains the “Deep State” conspiracy theory, and wants to model itself after Hungary’s authoritarian, ethnoreligious nationalism.

If anything, their distancing is perhaps motivated by self-interest with an increasing realization that the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee are ramping up their investigations, which might implicate many of their colleagues and place them in serious legal jeopardy. At any rate, their words are hollow when compared to their actions, which are in full support of the GOP’s radical agenda against voting rights, climate change, income inequality, gun control, police reform, and any meaningful attempt at addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Recall that McConnell similarly had harsh words for Trump after the failed coup attempt, but he still voted against impeaching him. In 2021, McConnell warned of a “death spiral” for democracy, yet he has done almost nothing to rein in the extremists of his own party. His legacy will be defined by being an obstructionist who made the Senate into a legislative graveyard and surgically packed the courts with right-wing hacks—most notably the Supreme Court, which just oversaw a 5-4 decision that will suppress Black voters in Alabama.

Another top Republican who is doing his part to accelerate the death spiral of U.S. democracy is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who rather than answer questions about the RNC’s “legitimate political discourse” madness, ran from reporters like he was practicing for an upcoming track and field competition.

Much like McConnell, McCarthy initially blamed Trump, publicly saying, “the president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” A year later, after realizing his base was fully radicalized by the Big Lie, he did a 180 and said, “I was the first person to contact him when the riots were going on,” adding that Trump promised to “put something out to make sure to stop this. And that’s what he did; he put a video out later.”

When asked if he supported the RNC’s resolution, McCarthy declined to respond. However, he defended the use of “legitimate political discourse,” and did a remarkable Jedi mind trick by suggesting the RNC was actually referring to subpoenas sent to RNC officials who were allegedly part of Trump’s false electors scheme. Nobody believed him. Nonetheless, House Republicans did emerge from a closed-door meeting agreeing that Rep. Cheney, who voted with Trump 93 percent of the time and used to be the third highest-ranking Republican, should not be re-elected.

Both Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger were targeted by the RNC for simply putting loyalty to the country and national security above the GOP’s interests. Their punishment is permanent exile. They were not guilty of antisemitism, anti-Muslim bigotry, allegations of sex trafficking, or palling around with white nationalists. Those are the acceptable sins, respectively, of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebart, Matt Gaetz, and Paul Gosar. None of them have been publicly condemned by the RNC for their vile behavior nor reprimanded by the party’s leadership.

Instead, the RNC has decided to focus explicitly on Cheney and Kinzinger, because they were the only two Republicans who chose to sit on the House Select Committee. As a result, Rep. Kinzinger has announced he’s no longer running for re-election. In November, Wyoming Republicans voted to stop recognizing Liz Cheney as a member of the GOP. (Her last name…is freaking Cheney.)

For his brief dalliance with democracy, Pence now also stands condemned and joins Kinzinger and Cheney in the small cast of villains and traitors to the right-wing cause.

Justice Department is Finally Getting Serious About Holding the Jan. 6 Ringleaders Accountable

Despite spending four years utterly debasing himself and prostituting his dignity and ethics in servitude of Trump, Pence was recently thrown under the bus by none other than former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who still nurtures hopes of becoming president one day. Pence’s crime? He said Trump was “wrong” to claim that the vice president could have overturned the results of the 2020 election. Haley jumped on Fox News to praise Pence as a “good man” and an “honest man,” but nonetheless revealed her true loyalties when she admitted, “But I will always say, I just, I’m not a fan of Republicans going against Republicans.”

Ironically, Haley did just that against Trump last year when she said, “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him.” Now? Haley says, “We need him in the Republican Party. I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”

Haley, perhaps unintentionally, revealed a painful and sad truth about the modern GOP that many within powerful institutions, especially the media, are still unwilling to hear. It is no longer a normal political party with sober adults who are able and willing to form guardrails that protect democracy. The movement is so beholden to its radicalized base that it must abandon its own legacy star, Liz Cheney, simply for refusing the Big Lie.

Where are the moderate Republicans and why can’t they condemn this violent extremism? They’re too busy applying lipstick to a pig, but sadly they can’t hide the true face of this ravenous herd coming for our democracy.